Borderities: The Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders

Abstract

After a long period of oblivion that lasted for much of the second half of the 20th century, border studies over the past 20 years have once again become a fertile topic of discussion and debate, as national and international politics have brought them to the forefront of our news media. While knowledge about borders is growing steadily, their constant evolution invites scholars and practitioners alike to continue to revise ideas about what they represent for us and what they do to our lives. Following historical attempts to draw a universal understanding of the international border (Ancel, 1938; Foucher, 1986; Guichonnet & Raffestin, 1974; Martinez, 1994; Prescott, 1978), the focus has been on border dynamics, essentially that of debordering and rebordering (Amilhat Szary & Fourny, 2006; Kaplan & Häkli, 2002; Newman & Paasi, 1998; Popescu, 2011). However, the multiplication of borders seems to induce a shift from fixity to multi-location (Balibar, 2009; Squire, 2011; Vaughan-Williams, 2008). Through these processes, what appeared to be a linear divide loses its traditional topography, symbolic power and function as it disseminates in a reticular and relational manner that is always renegotiated in a way that could lead us to envision the border as ‘mobile’. We have been calling for a research agenda on the mobile border since one of our research projects bore this expression in its title in 2008, which was soon followed by preparations for an important international conference, the XIth meeting of the ‘Border Regions in Transition’ (BRIT) network (Amilhat Szary & Giraut, 2011).